When we launched, nearly eight years ago, we considered Israel to be part of the European technology ecosystem(s). And even though that raised some questions from the community once in a blue moon, the decision to include Israel back then made sense (it was also ours and only ours to take, which is part of the beauty of starting your own tech blog).
I had traveled to the country a couple of times, frequented local conferences (as well as plenty of events organised and attended by Israelis across Europe) and participated in ecosystem tours, in part because of fascination with how its tech scene had developed over the past decades. There were many stories left untold, and that's one of the reasons we had started Tech.eu in the first place.
Later on, when we started gathering and analysing in-depth deals data from across the European tech ecosystems, it was logical to include Israel as well.
Today, coinciding with the recent launch of our new website and visual identity, we are announcing that we will henceforth no longer publish news stories about Israeli tech companies, and will exclude data from the Israeli tech ecosystem in our future research coverage and data analysis.
There are a few reasons behind this decision. One is the fact that local media companies, both established and new ones, have tremendously improved the depth and frequency with which they cover the Israeli tech scene, whilst local research companies are doing a great job at analysing the ecosystem data.
Another reason is that the lines between Israeli companies actually based in Israel, and those who were started by Israeli founders but are based elsewhere in the world, most often in the United States, have become extremely blurry.
In itself, that's not that much of an issue if you can evaluate every single story and make an editorial decision whether a company can be effectively considered Israel-based on a case-by-case basis. However, that's become a lot more challenging for us in recent years, as the European technology ecosystems have evolved and matured in spectacular fashion - for a news team with limited resources, that evidently has implications, especially when we increasingly want to bring more data-driven analysis and research reports to the table.
Our goal is to continue leading the coverage of the ongoing evolution of the European innovation ecosystems, and that increasingly means making certain editorial decisions and sacrifices on the altar of focus.
Quite frankly, at present we also lack the strong founder and investor network in Israel that we have in Europe to properly cover the local tech ecosystem's highs and lows, while others have stepped up in recent years to do so.
Those are some of the reasons why we've decided to put an end to our coverage of the Israeli tech ecosystem after eight educational years. We will continue to read the inspiring stories from the Israeli tech scene from a variety of other sources with great interest in the future.
The fascination with how the 'Startup Nation' was established, and has since grown up to become a 'Scale-Up Nation' has not waned in recent years as far as I'm concerned - quite the contrary!
These are some of the great publications we will continue to follow closely to stay up-to-date on all things Israeli tech:
- CTech (Calcalist) - Globes - IVC Research Center - NoCamels - Haaretz
- VC Cafe
- The Jerusalem Post - The Times of Israel - TechTime
Let us know if we're missing any good ones!
Featured image credit: Shai Pal / Unsplash
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